The Digital Consumer: November 2007 Archives

These
were the opening remarks I gave a few moments ago at the Interactive
Advertising Bureau’s first-ever Audience Measurement Leadership Forum.
That even is taking place right now at the Marriott New York Hotel in
midtown Manhattan.

I have spoken and written about
growing up as the son of a market and media researcher. What I have
never said publicly is that my life has been framed by market and media
research. Today, for the first time, I will tell that story.

My father entered TempleUniversity in Philadelphia
in 1948, to pursue a degree in marketing - a brand new major at the
school, and one that combined his interests in business, radio and that
new invention, television.

It was a good choice for a Jewish boy
from Northeast Philly, for media research was one of the few areas in
white collar business that had been open to Jews. That was true even in
the advertising agency business, which today we recall for its
friendliness to minorities. Other than in research departments, that
had not been the case: One historian who reviewed the 1931 edition of Who’s Who in Advertising found only 92 identifiably Jewish names among the 5,000 people listed.

My father’s first post-college job was at the Benson & Benson research company in Princeton, N.J., which had been founded by Larry Benson, previously the managing director of the Gallup Poll.At that time, Princeton was the Silicon Valley of research. Startup companies dotted Witherspoon and Nassau Streets, most of them, like Benson & Benson, founded by refugees from Gallup.Later,
when I was fortunate enough to attend the university located in that
town, my Dad, referring to his walk from the train station to his
office, liked to say he had “passed through Princeton.”
It was a not-so-subtle acknowledgement that in the 1950’s, there were
precious few real opportunities for kids of his background to have
passed through Princeton.

Of course, by that time, he’d moved from Philadelphia with his family to the New York
area. He’d been hired by NBC in 1957 to do research on the public’s
potential reaction to another forthcoming invention, color television.
His wife - my mother - had started up a small company that trained
interviewers to go out into the field and conduct survey research.
Their eldest child - that would be me - had made pocket money during
high school by conducting hundreds of these interviews. Among my more
pungent memories is lugging a 20-pound contraption called a “tachistocope” around the richest and hilliest sections of Ridgewood, N.J.,
trying to find scotch drinkers over 50 willing to let me into their
mansions to show split-second flash images of different actors trying
out for the title role in the Ambassador Scotch print advertising
campaign.

Asking Questions

I learned that I liked asking questions for a living. I also learned
that there is nothing more difficult than trying to find in a six block
radius in Denville, N.J.
a woman over 50 who is willing to test a vaginal deodorant. So I became
a newspaper reporter, instead. Grilling Presidential candidates, I can
attest, is much easier than filling the last gaps in a quota sample.

I
mention this background because for much of the past 100 years, media
and market researchers have been the business world’s most rugged,
unflagging, and unfailing pioneers. Whether refugees from Germany, kids from the inner city, or emigrants from Asia,
through the decades they have been driven by one goal: the quest for
truth. What happened? What made it happen? What did they see? When? How
did they react? Can we prove it? Can we repeat it? How are opinions
shaped? Where do our preferences come from? Did it make a difference?

It
is no exaggeration to say that these have been some of the most
important questions asked - and provisionally answered - in public life
during the past seven decades. Phrases that now are part of the fabric
of everyday conversation originated in the classrooms and offices of
researchers: “Personal influence…” “Public opinion…” “Opinion leader…”
“Pollster…” “Survey said…”

It is also no exaggeration to say
that the men and women behind such concepts were among the giants of
American business and public life. Paul Lazarsfeld, Frank Stanton, Herta Herzog, Leo Bogart, Hadley Cantril, Art Nielsen, George Gallup, Elihu Katz
- these were the people who pioneered audience research, invented media
metering, forged modern politics, and shaped news and entertainment
broadcasting. They even helped integrate the U.S. Armed Forces.
Remarkable as it may seem, they walked the earth in our lifetimes.

Some
of these pioneers still do walk this earth. And some of them are in
this room. The technologies may change, but one thing remains constant:
the researcher’s quest for truth.

Today, the opportunity to find
truth in business and public life is greater than it ever has been.
Interactive technologies are allowing us deeper and deeper access to
peoples’ ideas, behaviors, and consumption patterns. We are able to
combine sample-based research and census-based research to create a
richer portrait of peoples’ lives than research scientists ever thought
possible.

Research Startups

Entrepreneurs are taking advantage of these new opportunities. The research startups dotting the marketing and media landscape make the Witherspoon and Nassau Streets of Princeton in the 50’s look fallow indeed. comScore, Quantcast, Hitwise, Compete, M:Metrics, Omniture and scores of others have joined venerable firms like Nielsen to alter our understanding of social life.

Thanks
to interactive technologies, media companies, too, have access to
troves of information about the preferences, desires, and needs of
their viewers, readers, and subscribers. They can deploy this
information to make theirnews, entertainment,
and advertising offerings more engaging and relevant to segments and
sub-segments of their audience than ever before. Time Warner, Disney,
Viacom, CondeNast,
Meredith are joining “newcomers” to the media business like Microsoft,
and contributing to this deeper, richer, and more valuable picture of
the why’s and what’s of consumer behavior.

These
media and research companies, together with advertising agency and
marketer research departments, are transforming the way the marketing
and media ecosystem operates. Thanks to them, our portrait of society -
a rendering that used to be painted with broad brushes - is now a
pointillist painting.

Of course, with new technologies and the
opportunities they unleash come new complexities. Last March, the
Interactive Advertising Bureau hosted a Summit Meeting on Audience
Measurement. Executives from comScore
and Nielsen joined representatives from major advertising agencies,
marketers, media companies, and media-marketing-and-advertising trade
associations to chart the journey forward.

It was a
significant gathering, because we all realized that we seek the same
thing: to use the new emerging interactive technologies to bring us
closer and closer to the truth about consumer behaviors.

IAB’s Role

This conference is a direct result of that gathering. The IAB
agreed then to take on a vital role: To demystify the metrics of
interactive marketing. To help educate the marketplace about what
works, why, when, and under what circumstances. To showcase the
advances in audience research made by research firms, media companies,
ad agencies, and marketing departments. To make this pointillist
painting of human behavior even more refined.

This is a new role for the IAB.
We join venerable groups in the marketing world, like the Advertising
Research Foundation, the American Association of Advertising Agencies,
the Magazine Publishers of America, and the Newspaper Association of
America, in this activity - and happily so. Few matters in business
today can be more important than shedding light on - and reaching
agreement on - how we measure consumer behavior.

The people you will hear from today would make Frank Stanton and Paul Lazarsfeld
proud. These contemporary research pioneers will describe for you the
new ways they are looking at peoples’ media journeys. They will explain
how they are bringing together methodologies to measure activities in
different media. They will give you a sense of what’s coming next.

On behalf of the 450 members of the IAB, I thank all these pioneers for joining with us in advancing the science of audience research. I want to thank the IAB’s
Research Council for helping to plan such a rich and provocative day. I
want to thank all of you for taking time during a busy holiday season
to pursue this quest for truth.